Recent trends in the vending industry have been to offer higher priced items out of vending equipment at traditionally unattended vending locations. Higher priced item offers can result from the desire to vend larger portions of products such as the twenty-ounce soda bottle verse the twelve-ounce soda can. In other cases the higher priced items can be items that until recently my not have been consider for sale through vending equipment such as phone cards, disposable cameras, and frozen food entrees to name a few.
The vending industry's desire to vend higher priced items has given rise to issues related to currency and inventory. For example, with the shift to vending twenty-ounce bottles many of the vending sales now involve more that one currency note, as an example two one-dollar bills to make a purchase. As a result the bill validator can fill to capacity with currency notes before all the items in the vending equipment have been sold. With a bill acceptor filled to capacity the vending equipment may not be able to transact another vending sale and place itself out-of-service. As a result vending operators can typically find themselves restocking vending equipment that still has product available for sale but because of the inability to take additional currency notes the vending equipment could not sell the inventory.
In addition, with many beverage type vending machines the shift from the twelve-ounce can to the twenty-ounce bottle can create coin mechanism issues. In moving to the larger size beverage the average price can move from typically slightly less than a dollar where little change was required when a dollar note was used for payment to slightly more than a dollar where the better part of a dollar in change can be required when two one-dollar notes are used for payment for a vend. Resultant from this price move not only do the bill validators fill to capacity faster and stop working sooner, but the coin mechanism can be required to supply a customer with more change on each vend depleting a coin mechanism coin supply faster. Once the coin change supply is depleted the vending machine may be rendered out-of-service.
In addition to the new burden on bill acceptors and coin mechanisms resultant from the sale of higher priced items other issues related to the vending of higher priced items can arise. One such issue can be that a customer may not have enough money on-hand to effectuate the vending purchase. In the case of phone cards, cameras, and frozen food vend prices may range from several dollars to forty dollars, fifty dollars, or more. In many cases the customer may have the desire to purchase the high priced item but simply lacks the amount of currency required to effectuate the purchase. In other cases the customer may be reluctant to trust the vend worthiness of the vending equipment with what the customer considers to be a significant amount of money.
As the proliferation of higher priced vend items continues to become more pervasive in today's society the vending industry has become increasingly concerned about tracking inventory and monitoring the operational status of the vending equipment remotely. It is considered a general belief within the vending industry that remotely monitoring vending equipment can optimize a route driver's daily activity and reduce operational costs associated with the sales and delivery of products to the vending equipment.
To date auditing devices have been designed to be placed inside the vending equipment or held in the hand of a route collector for the purpose of gathering vending equipment inventory and operational data which can later be downloaded to a computer. These devices however have been costly to manufacture, install, maintain, and operate. As such the total cost of the technology verse the savings on the operational costs associated with the sales and delivery of products to date have not made for a sound or compelling business model. As a result the vending industry has been slow to adopt ‘audit’ only technology.
The cost benefit model of the ‘audit’ hardware may not be the only issue hampering the proliferation of ‘audit’ only device. Data communication costs, the costs of getting the data back to a central computer center can be a significant limitation on getting vending equipment remotely ‘audit’ capable or as it is commonly referred to in the vending industry as ‘online’.
Such telecommunication costs can include the cost of running a telephone line to the vending equipment. In many cases the vending equipment may be in a location not conducive to having a dedicated phone line installed proximate to the vending equipment, such as in a concrete basement, on a golf course, in a shopping mall, or on a university campus to name a few. Once a telephone line is installed there can be monthly service charges incurred from the telecommunication company providing the service. These costs alone can in effect nullify the savings of having the vending equipment ‘online’.
To avoid the high expense of running dedicated telephone lines to vending equipment the vending industry has pursued wireless wide area network (WAN) options. Implementing a wireless WAN has typically involved purchasing additional wireless hardware, and trying to integrate the wireless hardware with the ‘audit’ hardware. If the integration effort was successfully the hardware, service, and maintenance costs of the combined solution were typically significantly increased compared to the ‘audit’ device only solution costs. In addition, the service and maintenance required for the combined wireless system is typically different then the non-wireless ‘audit’ device only solution.
In addition to the increased hardware costs for the wireless WAN solution, the wireless communication service fees paid to the wireless network provider can be more then those fees charged by the communication companies providing telephone line service. A technology solution and service fee structure that could effectively nullify the anticipated sales and delivery savings from having the vending equipment ‘online’.
In part a long felt need exists for a solution related to a cost effective system and method for remotely auditing vending equipment, and for providing additional payment options at the point of sale for goods and services vended from vending equipment. This coupled with the industry's shortcoming in these areas and other areas, some of which were mentioned above give rise to the present invention.